The impossibilists: the Socialist Party of Canada and the One Big Union, selected articles 1906-1938 - Larry Gambone

Impossibilist was the name sometimes given to the old Socialist Party of Canada. This name was not unique to Western Canada, but was also used to describe “all or nothing” type socialists in other parts of the English speaking world.

The US Socialist Labor Party and its affiliates in Australia and Scotland held somewhat similar beliefs. Ao too, the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Beyond the rejection of reformism, lay a libertarian ideal of socialism, one that saw workers running the means of production and not the state. The left-wing factions of German and Dutch Social Democracy, like the Canadian Impossibilists, favored anti-statist socialism. Then there were the Australian OBU, the IWW, the French CGT and a host of other revolutionary syndicalist unions, all libertarian socialists